Longmont woman's curry pickles are a harvest classic

Anne Kear will sell her curry pickles for $5 each during the Christmas Home Tour to benefit local organizations concerned with homelessness.
(
Elaine Cromie
)

Curry pickles

Ingredients

4 quarts cucumbers, sliced

6 cups sugar

1/2 cup mustard seed

2 tablespoons celery seed

1 tablespoon curry powder

2 quarts vinegar

2 handfuls salt

Directions

Wash and slice the cucumbers and put them in a large pot. Boil about gallon of water in another pot, and then throw two handfuls of salt in the water. Pour the boiling salt water over the cucumbers. Cover that pot, and let it sit at room temperature overnight.

The next day, drain and rinse the cucumbers with fresh, cold water. In another pot combine the vinegar, spices and sugar. Bring to a boil. Add the cucumbers, and bring to a second boil.

In the meantime, sterilize the canning jars in another pot of boiling water. Simmer the lids. Bring the canner pot to a boil.

Fill the empty sterilized jars with pickles and juice, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Put the lid on each jar and screw the ring on just until it resists more turning. Submerge jars in the boiling water canner. The water must cover the jar tops by about 2 inches.

The 47th annual Christmas Home Tour, sponsored by Longmont's First Congregational United Church of Christ, benefits local organizations concerned with preventing homelessness. For more information about the Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 event, visit ucclongmont.org/hometour or call 303-651-6546.

A box of Anne Kear's canned curry pickles, is seen at her home in Longmont. Kear has made more than 125 cans of curry pickles, peaches, apple sauce and beets this past summer.
(
Elaine Cromie
)

LONGMONT -- Back in the 1940s, the farmers paid her dad in perishables to supplement the small paycheck he got for preaching at their country church.

"We were a farming culture then, and you shared what you had," Anne (Diller) Kear said.

The Diller family gratefully accepted the homegrown gifts from the smaller congregation in Alliance, Ohio, and she remembers her mother spending the next month canning upwards of 200 quart jars to last them through the winter.

Kear, 72, said storing the fresh produce in their basement until they had time to preserve it produced a distinctively sweet aroma.

For that reason, most of the fresh fruits and vegetables went into jars without many other ingredients.

But the family always processed cucumbers with a special curry pickle recipe from Kear's maternal grandmother, Grace Wells.

It made the bland vegetable take on a somewhat exotic flavor, especially when compared with the usual meat-and-potatoes diet of the day.

So, when Kear grew up and settled down with her own family on a 11/2-acre plot in Wharton, Ohio, another small town, she grew cucumbers to make curry pickles.

As a young wife and mother of two boys, she even gleaned extra cucumbers from the neighbors' fields, something they invited her to do after they fulfilled their contracts to provide cucumbers to commercial pickle makers such as Vlasic.

Kear eventually gardened less to follow her father's footsteps into the ministry.

Times had changed. No one paid her with produce.

Still, the curry pickles she learned to make during her childhood came in handy when she retired in 2007.

That year, her church -- Longmont's First Congregational United Church of Christ -- asked her to donate something to sell at the annual Christmas Home Tour started nearly 50 years ago.

All 15 pints of her curry pickles sold for $5 each to benefit local organizations concerned with homelessness.

Now, Kear donates 25 pints every November and repeat customers tell her they look forward to stocking up.

Her son, Andy Kear, 42, does, too.

During a recent visit, he swaddled two pints of his mom's curry pickles in bubble wrap. Then, he slipped them into separate Ziploc bags and placed them in his hiking boots before packing them in his bag and getting on a plane back to his home in Ohio.

Sold-out status at the fundraiser, along with her family's petitions to save some curry pickles for them, remind her of why the old recipe survived.

"Curry is spicy. I know you can feel it in your head," she said, eyeing a jar. "But I've never met anyone who doesn't like them."

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story